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Over the past decade, there’s been a sharp uptick in the number of books published by Indigenous authors living in what is now called Canada. There has also been a sharp turn in Canadian society, as non-Indigenous people grapple with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action and with restorying the mythic multicultural Canada of international supposed peacekeeping fame into a settler-colonial state that continues to oppress, subjugate, and marginalize Indigenous peoples. The changes we see today are a result of decades of activism and community-based work by Indigenous peoples in a variety of sectors including education, law, social services, and the arts. Here are the classic stories you need to read—four books by Indigenous authors and four written by allies in media and academia.
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The Classic Novel
Porcupines and China Dolls, by the late Robert Arthur Alexie, examines the legacy of residential schools on Indigenous peoples and communities. We weren’t calling it “intergenerational trauma” in 2002, but Alexie’s finely drawn characters show the everyday impacts of trauma on survivors and how those impacts affect families and communities: self-medicating pain through alcohol, re-enacting abuse and avoiding emotional connection by engaging in meaningless sex, and dealing with secrets and memories by not talking about it at all.
When the main characters (James and Jake) lose a friend to suicide, they finally break the silence and begin their healing journey, which is framed by a return to Gwich’in culture and a reclamation of the natural world as our first and best teacher.
Alexie was a brave man for creating characters who were deeply wounded and flawed as a result, and this book is the real, hard truth. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny and will give you a glimmer of hope.
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The Story That Will Break Your Heart
Investigative journalists Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud had the cooperation of the Stonechild family when they wrote Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild. When Stonechild froze to death in November 1990 on the outskirts of Saskatoon, the police said he was drunk and died by misadventure, even though a witness said he’d seen Neil bloody and in the back of a police car on the night of his death, screaming that the police were going to kill him.
This impeccably researched creative nonfiction book takes readers through Stonechild’s life and death, the freezing deaths of five other Indigenous men, a subsequent RCMP investigation, the inquests into several of the deaths, the trial of the officers involved in the unlawful confinement of one Indigenous man, and the public inquiry that led to the dismissal of the officers who had Stonechild in custody that night. Starlight Tour documents the ways that police routinely obstruct justice.
If we count the number of Indigenous people killed by police in the last few years, it’s clear that nothing has changed except the methodology.
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The Game Changer
In One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police, and the Ipperwash Crisis, author Peter Edwards documents police brutality and government deception, and how the Mike Harris government pressured the Ontario Provincial Police during the 1995 incident at Ipperwash Provincial Park, when a peaceful protest by Anishinaabeg people over a pre-colonial burial ground and land that was appropriated by the government during the Second World War turned into a shoot-out that ended with the death of Anthony (Dudley) George. Acting Sergeant Kenneth Deane was convicted of criminal negligence causing death and resigned from the OPP because, as Edwards puts it, he “knowingly shot an unarmed man and then lied about it in court.”
The book ends before the Ipperwash Inquiry, but it makes a clear argument that democracy does not exist when the rules of law don’t apply equally to every citizen. Like the resistance at Kanehsatake (Oka) in 1990, Ipperwash was a turning point that changed Canada forever.
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The Book That Asks the Right Questions
Some people continue to cling to the Bering Strait theory, presumably because they cannot imagine a world in which Indigenous oral traditions might actually be equal to western science. In Bones: Discovering the First Americans, the whip-smart Elaine Dewar spends 600 very engaging pages discussing archaeology, DNA, museums, racism, anthropology, vicious wars between scientists (including lawsuits and threats), Indigenous stories of origin and migration, her travels between Chile and Alaska (and her conversations with researchers, scientists, and Indigenous people), and how researchers feel they have to conform to accepted orthodoxy to get project funding.
This is a bold book that was way before its time, and I remember reading at least one dismissive review by a science writer that perfectly illustrated Dewar’s point.
In Bones, Dewar centres Indigenous voices and debunks a scientific orthodoxy that has determined how those in the western hemiphere understand and approach their history—as well as the place Indigenous people occupy in that history.
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The Case Histories
Over the past 30 years, Cree medicine man Russell Willier from the Sucker Creek First Nation in northern Alberta has gotten some flak from Indigenous people who think this kind of Indigenous knowledge should stay within the community and not be widely shared. Thankfully, Willier has stayed true to his vision, which is to lead the reclamation and revitilization of Indigenous science and medicine by sharing it with the world.
In Cry of the Eagle: Encounters with a Cree Healer, Willier shares his worldview and healing practices with anthropologists David Young, Grant Ingram, and Lise Swartz, who spent three years watching him treat physiological dysfunctions and chronic, stress-related conditions with plant-based remedies, sweat-lodge therapy, spiritual ceremonies, and other techniques. Western allopathic medicine considers all other forms of science and medicine as primitive and/or dangerous. The case histories and other information in this book—which is written as narrative, and not in dry research form—expose that belief for what it is: ethnocentrism based on white supremacy. Cry of the Eagle looks toward a different world, where settler-colonial medicine works alongside Indigenous knowledges for the benefit of people seeking care and healing.
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The One That Gave Us Hope
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples submitted its final report in November 1996, but the federal government of Jean Chretién chose to ignore its 400 recommendations. After that affront, journalist Suzanne Fournier and Indigenous activist and social worker Ernie Crey released Stolen From Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities.
Their book uses mostly first-person stories to document how Canada attempted to assimilate Indigenous peoples through religious and cultural indoctrination by forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools and by removing Indigenous children and placing them in non-Indigenous foster homes—but these painful stories become inspiring when the subjects recount how they found their way back to their identities, birth families, communities, and cultures. The book also examines the work that is being done inside Indigenous communities to deal with learned patterns of sexual abuse and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (two of the everyday impacts of intergenerational trauma). The authors make clear that healthy Indigenous children mean a healthy Canada.
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The Classic Memoir
Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging, by Warren Cariou, is a perfect memoir. It’s funny and it’s sad, it makes powerful observations about the meanness of small-town life—and what that means for his hometown of Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, with its mixed population of Cree, Métis, and Scottish and Slavic settlers—and it’s framed by a visit home after the death of his father, who was the family storyteller.
In this beautiful and affecting book, Cariou asks himself “Where do I come from?” and then shares the answer in a way that sheds light on history, politics, culture, anger, fear, discrimination, love, and the boreal forest of rock, water, and muskeg that underpins it all. Somewhere along the journey, Cariou also discovers a family secret, one kept hidden for generations, that alters his sense of identity and belonging. There are a lot of memoirs out there, but this award-winning book is the GOAT. Read it and you’ll be a better person, guaranteed.
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The Old Ones
Those Who Know: Profiles of Alberta’s Native Elders—which was recently released in a 20th anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Emma LaRocque—contains 31 original profiles of Indigenous elders (author Dianne Meili has also included additional profiles and interviews in the anniversary edition). These stories contain teachings born out of Indigenous life on the trapline, in the army, in jail, in residential schools, on reserve, and in a community that left a reserve to resurrect pre-colonial life in the bush. Meili’s writing sparkles throughout—there are no misplaced words or lazy clichés here—and she captures the complex faces of normal, everyday people who are also spiritual and cultural leaders because of their experience, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. The people in this collection—most born in the early 1900s—have served community by counselling, praying, fasting, dancing, hunting, and birthing new generations. They hold back on judgment, but they speak important truths that remind us that living together is a complex exercise in reciprocity.
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A bold reimagining of Suzanne Methot’s last book, Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing, this YA adaptation is written for young adults, reluctant readers, and literacy learners. Killing the Wittigo explains the traumatic effects of colonization on Indigenous peoples and communities and how trauma alters an individual’s brain, body, and behaviour. The book explores how learned patterns of behaviour—the ways people adapt to trauma to survive — are passed down within families, and offers suggestions for breaking the cycle. Killing the Wittigo takes an unsparing look at colonial practices that create trauma and also includes the first-person voices of young people who are on their healing journey. Individual chapters focus on the importance of tackling unresolved emotions; identity and control; lateral violence; how to set healthy boundaries in families and relationships; dis-ease and self-care; how stories help survivors create meaning; culture-based alternatives to colonial systems and institutions; and how culture and spirituality can promote healing. Full of line art and featuring an original illustration of the wittigo spirit-creature by artist Mapris Purgas, the book contains quotations, song lyrics, poems, mindfulness activities, and resources for additional support. In a starred review, Booklist said that Killing the Wittigo “is an eye-opening and important resource for anyone concerned with North America's colonial legacy.”